One of the more recent controversies in German historiography revolves around the publication of Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (The Ministry and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the FRG). Then German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer commissioned this voluminous (ca. 880 pages), multi-authored study in 2005 partly in response to the Foreign Office publishing a respectful obituary for Franz Nüßlein, a career diplomat who was active in the Reichs Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia that resumed his duties in the Foreign Office after his return to the FRG after a stint in a Czechoslovakian jail. While there are numerous controversies and problems with Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, namely that it overstreched its thesis that the Foreign Ministry took a major initiative in the Final Solution and its culpability was coeval with other organizations such as the SS, it did reveal something of an open secret that the Foreign Ministry was often heavily involved in the various crimes and activities of the Third Reich.

Although the brief period of German hegemony in Europe was accomplished by German arms, focusing too much on military aspects of German rule often leads to a skewed portrait,such as this map from the popular game Axis & Allies which presents the sphere of German influence as a monotone silver grey. This picture of the Third Reich often obscures more complicated realities of German rule and administration. German allies such as Hungary, Italy, Bulgaria or Finland often had a degree of nominal independence over domestic affairs. Even in areas of occupied Europe, the Germans occupational authorities needed some degree of a civil administration and there was some governmental agencies still functioning. The Foreign Ministry positioned itself in this situation as the ideal messenger of German wishes to their increasingly reluctant allies and its career diplomats often sought to be a liaison between the German state and the occupied. In the former case, von Ribbentrop and the Foreign Office were often the agents to convey German demands for the ghettoization and deportation of the Jews of its Axis partners and the Foreign Ministry was a cog enabling these deportations across what were existing borders in Europe. The level of activity of the Foreign Ministry in occupied countries was somewhat mixed which was indicative of the highly chaotic and often extemporized occupation policies of the Third Reich. At one extreme end, Foreign Ministry agents were exceptionally powerful in occupied Denmark in which occupation policy was to create "a state of suspension between independence and dependence," according to its German Plenipotentiary, SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best. At the other end of the spectrum, the Foreign Ministry found itself increasingly locked out of the General Government and the new Reichsgaue carved out of Poland and the USSR, which found themselves under the purview of the SS-led Generalplan Ost. In Western Europe, the Foreign Ministry often operated in a subordinate role to the military-led occupation, but the existence of rump Western European governments like Vichy often promised to break von Ribbentrop out of this junior partnership. the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, sought to cultivate a close relationship with various French conservatives to prepare France to become a junior partner in the German-led New Order's war against Britain and the USSR. Abetz gained some allies in his cause within the Propaganda Ministry, especially after Barbarossa in which Goebbels took great pains to describe the invasion as a European crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism. Abetz's hazy vision of harnessing a French-led Western Europe in the service of National Socialism proved to be ephemeral. Hitler never really countenanced any concessions to defeated France to but any meaningful partnership and the military often chafed at any sign of the Foreign Ministry gaining power over the military occupation. In March 1943, the Foreign Ministry in cooperation with Ciano sought to draft a declaration of a European Confederation that would act as a diplomatic counterweight to the Allied United Nations, but Hitler dismissed such ideas and harangued Mussolini over it in a summit meeting the following September.

The patchwork nature of the Foreign Ministry's power was reflective of the polycratic nature of the Third Reich in which multiple power centers existed inside the German state apparatus and there was little to no coordination between state agencies. Access to Hitler and his own decision-making process was a vital bellwether in this structure and agencies that were more in line with the Führer gained at the expense of their rivals. The ascendancy of the SS from 1939 onward was a the supreme example of this phenomena and many agencies found themselves being the errand boys for SS initiatives. The career diplomats of the Foreign Ministry in areas peripheral to German power, such as Greece and the Balkans, often had to implement genocidal directives and other harsh repressive measures as they were often the most senior German bureaucrats present. Their knowledge of foreign countries also meant that the Foreign Ministry officials were often tasked with the looting of European art and other cultural artifacts. The polycratic nature of German rule helped to foster a cumulative radicalization in these agencies adapted more extreme positions as they both sought to adjust to new realities and regain some of their power. An example of this was the famed Madagascar Plan initiated by von Ribbentrop to deport Europe's Jews to the French island of Madagascar. The Foreign Office floated the idea of such a Jewish reservation in June 1940 and it was the culmination of various ideas to resolve the Jewish question. Franz Rademacher, the head of the Foreign Ministry's Jewish Department, argued that such a plan would lead to the "liberation of the world from the chains of Jewry and Freemasonry." Although Hitler toyed with the Madagascar Plan briefly, the reality of British naval supremacy torpedoed it. While Holocaust historians often point to the Madagascar Plan as an example of how Germans were envisioning extreme solutions to the Jewish question as early as 1940, it also highlights an abortive attempt by von Ribbentrop and the diplomats of the Foreign Ministry to shape German war aims and objectives through its adaption of radical policies.

Outside of Europe, the Foreign Ministry's ambassadors and envoys found themselves increasingly isolated and irrelevant as the war dragged on. The Foreign Ministry was a source of intelligence about the world for the Third Reich, but its activities became more curtailed and suffered from competition Ernst Bohle's NSDAP Auslands-Organisation (Foreign Organization of the NSDAP) which sought to cultivate connections between various German emigre groups. Foreign Ministry propaganda tried to spin German military successes as a sign of an emerging German-led Europe, but this alarmed many neutrals rather than forcing them to adjust to a new order. Allied naval superiority meant that Europe was cut off from the wider world, so that the best diplomatic card Germany had in 1940/41- the control of Western Europe's economy- was largely irrelevant.

Part of the sorry state of affairs of the Foreign Ministry was due to von Ribbentrop's own rather slimy personality (one of his nicknames was von Ribbensnob) and his poor leadership. Yet the Foreign Ministry's failures and culpability for the crimes of the Third Reich transcended issues of personality. The exploitative nature of National Socialist ideology meant that German success placed German diplomacy inside a cul de sac in which German diplomats had little options. Initiatives to found a new order based on a more cooperative model, albeit one that was still racially exclusionary and predicated on German superiority, often could gain very little traction in this environment. Advocates of an alternative German occupatio like Abetz or Best were often sidelined because their proposals required some compromises by Germany, something Hitler never countenanced. Many of the career diplomats of the Foreign Ministry thus became lackeys of a genocidal regime, a role which more than a few of them sadly were quite willing to play.

Sources

Hürter, Johannes. "The German Foreign Office, the Nazi dictatorship, and the Holocaust: a critical commentary on Das Amt und die Vergangenheit". GHI Publications, 2011. http://www.ghi-dc.org/files/publications/bulletin/bu049/bu49_081.pdf

Jacobsen, Hans Adolf, and Arthur L. Smith. The Nazi Party and the German Foreign Office. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. Germany and the Second World War. / Vol. 5, Organization and mobilization of the German sphere of power. Part 1, Wartime administration, economy, and manpower resources 1939-1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.